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Catalogues of Jaina Manuscripts
Dr. Ashok Kumar Singh*
Indian collection of manuscripts outnumbered those in any other country in the world. The Jaina tradition also significantly enriched this treasure. The Jaina manuscripts available in various languages, format and scripts such as Devanagari, Gujrati, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu etc., applied different materials such as bitch bark, palm leaf, paper, leather, copper-plate, textile, stone, clay- tablet, wooden board, etc. The growth and development of human knowledge including socio-cultural history, language and literature, science and technology, art and crafts, in the Indian sub-continent over the centuries, is reflected in these manuscripts.
Indian manuscripts in general and Jaina manuscripts in particular are stored in Indian libraries, collections of academic institutions, monasteries, temples, etc. as well as in other countries also. Besides, fairly large number of manuscripts is stored in the private collections. The several efforts, by Indian as well as foreign scholars, made from the middle of the 19th century onwards, fructified in systematically cataloguing only a small percentage of the total manuscripts. A large part left uncatalogued; some are still unrecorded. The catalogues prepared, also, are mostly hand-written, giving some basic data: author, title, language, script, etc. The several manuscript collections: private as well as institutional, remained unattended for ycars, not recorded or listed in any form.
Invariably, all the Jaina catalogues provide only the bare minimum bibliographic data, author, title, date and extent, but with regard to even such details no uniformity or standard practice is followed by compilers. On the basis of the information contained therein these available catalogues may be grouped into following categories: *Senior Lecturer, Parshwanath Vidyapeeth, Varanasi.
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